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A study has found an increased chance of mortality of men who received blood donated from previously pregnant women:
Each time health care workers grab a pint of blood for an emergency transfusion, they make sure the donor and recipient have compatible blood types. But they do not pay attention to the donor's sex. A new study raises questions as to whether that should change.
In the first large study to look at how blood transfusions from previously pregnant women affect recipients' health, researchers discovered men under 50 were 1.5 times more likely to die in the three years following a transfusion if they received a red blood cell transfusion from a woman donor who had ever been pregnant. This amounts to a 2 percent increase in overall mortality each year. Female recipients, however, did not appear to face an elevated risk. The study [DOI: 10.1001/jama.2017.14825] [DX] of more than 42,000 transfusion patients in the Netherlands was published Tuesday in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association.
The American Red Cross and the researchers themselves were quick to say the study is not definitive enough to change the current practice of matching red blood cell donors to recipients. But if this explosive finding is confirmed with future studies, it could transform the way blood is matched—and it would suggest millions of transfusion patients worldwide have died prematurely. "If this turns out to be the truth, it's both biologically interesting and extremely clinically relevant," says Gustaf Edgren, an expert who was not involved in the study but co-wrote an editorial about it. "We certainly need to find out what's going on." Edgren, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute and a hematologist at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, says his own research [DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.0890] [DX] suggests the donor's sex makes no difference to the transfused patient. "Our data is really not compatible with this finding," he says.
Also at Reuters, Medscape, and Stat News.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:52PM
No, followup studies pretty much cease when the patient dies.
The numbers you quoted address the population, however the claimed results were not based on the whole population, but only those that died within three years.
They took all the deaths, traced it back to transfusions and if even one transfusion was from a previously pregnant woman they fell into that cohort.
(Most people getting a transfusion get more than one bag, and the bags are not matched for source. So its highly likely that anyone who got blood from a previously-pregnant woman also got blood from other women or men, unless they only ever needed exactly one bag).
Also, your figures for female donations in the Netherlands does not appear to have been the case in this study. Female sourced blood was a very small percentage here.
There are a lot of problems with this study. Until they go back and remove accidental deaths, or intentional deaths (homicides/suicides/drug ODs) the whole thing is suspect.
If they can test for a causal route, a difference in the blood (say for example: once-pregnant female blood carrying fewer/different immunity agents due to the need to tolerate a foreign "infection" for 9 months) then there would be a vector that they could study.
But as long as non-disease-related deaths are included it seems pretty hokey. And the other guys study doesn't support it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.